Tuesday, 6 February 2018

The Blind Musician and the Voyeurs

Károly Escher: The Angel of Peace, 1938

If asked why Hungary should have produced a significant
number of important photographers my first answer would be in the terms I have
just used in talking of my mother: history, health, opportunity, necessity and
general circumstance. And, indeed, I am sure all these played a part. But
beyond those it may not be fanciful to suppose that the very isolation of the
Hungarian language - which, despite producing many marvellous writers, depends
on translators of whom very few speak or read Hungarian - forced ambitious
Hungarians into the other less verbal arts: into music, film, and photography.
It may also be that the anxiety and adaptability produced by the nation’s geographical
shape-shifting, the amoeba existence I mentioned at the start, conditions and
refines tendencies and sensibilities. A constantly reiterated history of losses
and recoveries - the individual now in the bosom of the nation, now marooned – might
well make one sensitive to precisely such realms of feeling.

And we should, perhaps, add another destabilising factor. Kertész,
Capa, Moholy-Nagy, and Munkácsi were all Jews, each of them part of one
particular wave of exiled, expelled, terrified yet ambitious and talented
émigré Jews, generations of whom had been washing about the world for a couple
of millennia. After the fall of the Bolshevik republic of 1919, the leaders of
which were mostly Jewish, the reaction in Hungary led to a series of
anti-Semitic laws and produced a dangerous, oppressive atmosphere, especially
for those who had supported the revolution. There were plenty of reasons for getting
out into the world, to export your anxieties and search for delight in an open,
international visual language. That did not mean there was an exclusively Hungarian
sensibility to export, but the bedrock of Hungarian existence was always insecure.
In that sense it was faulty but almost infinitely adaptable. André Kertész’s young
friend and assistant, Sylvia Plachy, was a refugee from the same event that
caused my own family to flee. It was in New York that she met Kertész.

Sylvia Plachy: Tightrope Walker, 2011

I think there are two chief tendencies in the Hungarian
imagination, one essentially expressing itself as realism in the form of documentary:
the other looking to fantasy, a fantasy sometimes violent, sometimes lush. (Hungarian
film gives examples of both.) Work at either extreme might be outstanding. But
the journey across the extremes could produce an idiosyncratic yet universal blend
that speaks to both. Here it is in André Kertész.

André Kertész: Satiric Dancer, 1928

I want, finally, to return to Károly Escher and his Angel of
Peace. The photograph is dated 1938, a year before the war. Is the
image an example of irony or of hope? Is it perhaps comedy, a bitter joke? Surely,
it is all these things, and more.

One last poem, an excerpt, from an
early poem on photography written after my first return to Budapest in 1984. It
follows my mother in her photographic work. It is called The Photographer in
Winter. It is winter in Hungary and my mother is
preparing to go out with her camera.